Andy “Waxy” Baio writes about the “Supercut” phenomenon for Wired — these being videos that edit together dozens (sometimes hundreds) of instances of some iconic cinematic moment, whether it’s Sarah Palin’s breathing, Obama’s mentioning of “spending,” Hollywood actors answering the phone (or saying “We’ve got company” or similar cliches), or every instance of “dude” from The Big Lebowski.
I wanted to learn more about the structure of these videos, so I enlisted the help of the anonymous workforce at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to analyze the videos for me.
Using the database of 146 videos, I asked them to count the number of clips in each video, along with some qualitative questions about their contents. Their results were interesting.
When looking at the source of the videos, nearly half come from film with a little over one-third sourced from TV shows. The rest are a mix of real-life events, videogames, or a combination of multiple types, as you can see below.
According to the turker estimates, the average supercut is composed of about 82 cuts, with more than 100 clips in about 25% of the videos. Some supercuts, about 5%, contain over 300 edits!
